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By “value” I mean prudential value. Presumably, however, those who believe that all value is value simpliciter will also find my argument useful. I do not discuss moral value.
I shall take for granted a hedonic tone view of pleasure and pain. Presumably, however, those who hold other views on pleasure and pain will also find my argument useful. For a defense of my own view, see Ole Martin Moen, “The Unity and Commensurability of Pleasures and Pains,” Philosophia 41 (2013): 527–543.
David Hume makes a similar point. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), Appendix 1, §18.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Terence Irwin, 2nd edition (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishers, 1999), 1172b21-24.
Matthew Pianalto, “Against the Intrinsic Value of Pleasure,” Journal of Value Inquiry 43 (2009): 33–39.
Ibid., 33.
Ibid., 34–36.
It was recently revealed that the owner of a British fertility clinic has fathered up to 600 children. This clearly gave that man a great reproductive advantage. It seems odd, however, to claim that because of his reproductive success, this man’s life went more than a hundred times better than the lives of the rest of us. Telegraph, April 8, 2012.
Shelly Kagan, “The Limits of Well-Being,” Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (1992): 171. A famous parallel case is John Rawls’ example of the mathematician desiring to count the grass blades on the Harvard lawn.
E.g. Chris Heathwood, “Desire Satisfactionism and Hedonism,” Philosophical Studies 128 (2006): 540.
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 497.
Irwin Goldstein, “Pleasure and Pain: Unconditional Intrinsic Values,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (1989): 256.
Jonathan Dancy, “Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties,” Mind 268 (1983): 530–547. Aristotle makes the same point in the Nicomachean Ethics, 1175b27; See also Franz Brentano, Origin of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, trans. by Cecil Hauge (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1902), p. 90; Judith Jarvis Thomson, Goodness and Advice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 12.
Fred Feldman, “The Good Life: A Defense of Attitudinal Hedonism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2002): 604–628.
In this paper I use Moore’s conception of intrinsic value. See G. E. Moore, “The Conception of Intrinsic Value,” reprinted in Principia Ethica, Thomas Baldwin (ed.), 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
David Lewis, “Extrinsic Properties,” Philosophical Studies 44 (1983): 197.
Goldstein, 258. Goldstein assumes that badness can be causally efficient.
See Colin Klein, “What Pain Asymbolia Really Shows,” Mind 494 (2015): 493–516.
W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 134; W. D. Ross, Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 270.
Noah Lemos, Intrinsic Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 80–92.
Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 77–80.
William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 87–88. Presumably, one could compile a corresponding list of disvalues.
Moore, Principia Ethica, p. 115.
Ibid., p. 114.
Ross, The Right and the Good, p. 152.
Roger Crisp, Reasons and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 120.
Matthew Silverstein has made a similar observation. “Without hedonism,” Silverstein writes, “we cannot explain why all of our desires are related to happiness in this way.” Matthew Silverstein, “In Defense of Happiness: A Response to the Experience Machine,” Social Theory and Practice 26 (2000): 297.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Vol. 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Question 34, Article I–II, 65–70.
Richard Brandt points to a similar explanation of how we come to form our desires. Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 100. So does Peter Railton, who writes that our desires “can be explained in part as tracing a path oriented towards the experience of happiness.” Peter Railton, “Naturalism and Prescriptivity,” Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (1989): 167.
John Gay, “Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality” in W. King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, Vol. 1, 2nd edition, edited by E. Law (London: 1732), p. xxxi.
Ibid.
Ibid., xxxiii.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p 83. A similar argument, that appeals to projection rather than association, is presented in Ivar Labukt, Hedonistic Egoism: A Theory of Normative Reasons for Action, Doctoral Dissertation (Bergen: University of Bergen, 2010).
T. L. S. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 240.
Joseph Raz, Engaging Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 296, quoted in Labukt, p. 140.
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, pp. 89–110; Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 42–45.
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Moen, O.M. An Argument for Hedonism. J Value Inquiry 50, 267–281 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9506-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9506-9